| In
Memoriam
INRC
mourns the loss of Dr. K.
Stephen LaForge (from
MySpace page of band member)
INRC
mourns the loss of Edna Leong (submitted
by Dr. Eric Simon)
INRC mourns the loss of Dr.
Tom Burks (from
ASPET website)
In Memoriam of Dr. Akira Takemori (submitted
by Dr. Sandra Roerig)
In Memoriam of Dr. Sydney Archer (submitted
by Dr. Eric Simon)
In Memoriam of Dr. Hans Kosterlitz (submitted
by Dr. R. Alan North)
Dr.
(Karl) Stephen LaForge
Last night in Las
Vegas, the Toasters dedicated their set at the International Ska Circus
to the memory of Steve Hex aka Karl Steven Laforge. Although it was not
possible to get the band back to NYC mid-tour we did have the
opportunity to bring KSL out here with us. Steve was a massive
influence. Not only as a co-founder of the group but also as a key-
thinker, industrious, positive and astute. The early sound of the band
was largely built around his keyboard stylings before we upsized to the
horn-driven sound that characterizes the band today. Along with our gang
of fellow miscreants, Vicky Rose and Gary Eye, and then shortly
thereafter Messrs Grinnell, Dugan, Reginato and the Unity 2, we managed
to create a Frankenstein's monster that rampaged out from the crucible
of the lower east side to take over the world. And in fact is still
doing it. Steve's contributions to the band are innumerable. In the dark
hours of tours most foul his caustic sense of humour and pragmatism were
often what kept us going. Steve's chapter in the Toaster's history will
be a long and colourful one. But most of all what made KSL stand apart
was the man himself. There are few people that I personally rate as
being my friends. Steve was one of those. Whenever we saw each other –Steve
had the ability to just show up when you least expected him – it was
if time had stood still and we simply took up where we left off. That's
a rare gift, but Steve was a master at it. Acerbic wit, a black sense of
humour drier than the Sahara, and a lot of heart. The world needs more
Laforges, not less of them. So here's to you KSL. Wherever you are I'm
sure somebody is getting a zinger right about now.
(from band members of
the Toasters, a Ska musical group Stephen co-founded)
Ms. Edna Leoung
It is with great sadness that we report to all INRC members the recent death
of Ms Edna Leong. Edna, the sister-in-law of Dr. E. Leong (Eddie) Way, was well
known to all INRC regulars. During Eddie Way’s 10 years as Treasurer of INRC,
Edna attended every meeting. She was the one who spent much of the week gathering
receipts from all of the recipients of NIDA travel awards and made sure that
checks were mailed to them in a timely fashion. She always had a smile for everyone.
It was obvious that she enjoyed her work for INRC immensely, including the opportunity
to make friends from all over the world and to have even a small role in the
development of young scientists. Edna kept the INRC books for the entire period
during which Eddie was treasurer and did a fine job. Edna was the wife of the
late John Way Leong, the loving mother of 5 children, grandmother of 8 grandchildren
and great-grandmother of two. She will be missed very much by her family and
by all who knew her.
Mary Jeanne Kreek, President/Secretary Eric J. Simon Vice President/Treasurer
Please reply to: eric.simon@nyu.edu
Dr. Tom Burk
The INRC is diminished by the loss of Dr. Tom Burks who died March 2nd from
a heart attack. Tom was a friend and mentor for many of us. His
interests in opioid pharmacology, neuropeptide actions, and gastrointestinal
function made him a frequent contributor to the INRC.
Tom contributed to the vitality of this organization in many ways and served
as program chairman for the Copper Mountain INRC-1991 meeting that was held
jointly with FASEB. Most recently, Tom was executive vice president for research
and academic affairs at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
and a professor of pharmacology at the university's Medical School.
Additional information can be obtained at the following University of Texas
web site.
www.uthouston.edu/forMedia/newsreleases/nr2001/burks.htm
A Tribute to Dr. Akira E. Takemori
(1929-1998)
Members of the INRC were shocked
by the untimely death of Akira Takemori on March 12, 1998 while battling with
cancer. His passing was particularly tragic because he had only recently retired
from his position as Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University
of Minnesota and had been planning numerous activities for his retirement years.
Through his pioneering work with opioid receptor antagonists, he had made lasting
contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms of opioid action.
Dr. Takemori was born in Stockton,
CA and received his B.A. degree in Physiology from the University of California
-Berkley. He then earned the M.S. degree in Comparative Pharmacology and Toxicology
from the Universtiy of California Medical Center in San Francisco. Later, he
moved to Wisconsin and earned his Ph.D. degree in Pharmacology at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison in 1958, working with Dr. Gilbert Mannering. Dr. Takemori
stayed in Madison for his postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Enzyme Research
in the laboratory of Dr. Henry Lardy.
Dr. Takemori's first academic
appointment was at the State University of New York, Upatate Medical Center
in Syracuse, New York, where he was an Instructor, then an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Pharmacology. In 1963, he joined the Department of Pharmacology
at the University of Minnesota where he was promoted to Professor in 1969. He
remained in this Department until his retirement in 1994. During this time,
he was also a Visiting Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology at Keio
University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan (March-September 1971) and at
the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco (June 1973).
During his tenure at the University
of Minnesota Dr. Takemori trained eighteen Ph.D. graduate students and twenty
post-doctoral fellows as well as providing a research environment for six visiting
scientists. Those who trained in his laboratory have continued their successful
scientific careers in academic as well as industrial positions in the United
States and around the world. Dr. Takemori also served as the Department of Pharmacology
Director of Graduate Studies from 1987 until his retirement, when two faculty
members were then required to fill this position. His committment to education
of young scientists was also shown by his service on numerous graduate education
committees at the University as well as by serving as Program Director for the
Medical School Minority High School Student Research Apprentice Program. He
also received teaching awards including Teacher of the Year Award from the University
of Minnesota Dental School.
On the national/international
scene, Dr. Takemori was active in a number of professional societies, including
the INRC and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
(ASPET). He served on the Executive Committee of INRC from 1973-1974 and from
1979-1982. He was also the INRC Program Chairman for the 1982 INCR meeting.
His major contributions to ASPET included serving as President (1992), Councillor
(1978-1981) and IUPHAR Delegate (1991-1995). He also served on numerous ASPET
committees including the Program Committee and the Committee for Graduate Recruitment
in Pharmacology among others. He was on editorial boards for several journals
including the Journal for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the
Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology. In addition, he was a member of
Study Sections for the National Insititues of Health (Pharmacology Section),
the National Insititues on Drug Abuse and the National Science Foundation. He
also was a scientific consultant for other academic and industrial organizations
in the United States and other countries.
Of particular importance to
the INRC are Dr. Takemori's numerous contributions to our understanding of opioid
actions. His first publication on opioids was a Journal of Pharmacology and
Experimental Therapeutics paper on metabolic demethylation of morphine and morphinan-type
analgesics in 1958. Some of his more 200 publications (manuscripts, reviews
and book chapters) on opioids resulted from his work with Dr. Philip Portoghese,
a collaboration that produced the irreversible µ-selective opioid receptor antagonist
beta-funaltrexamine (b-FNA). Use of b-FNA as well as other opioid receptor subtype-selective
antagonists characterized by Dr. Takemori, has greatly advanced the study of
opioids and these drugs are widely used today in opioid research. For his many
scientific contributions, he received the Nathan B. Eddy Award in 1991 from
the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD).
Even though he was a very productive
scientist, Arky (a nickname used by his friends) found time to participate in
and excel in multiple sports, including golf, handball, skiing, judo and tennis.
For many years, he and his lifelong colleague and friend Dr. James Fujimoto
competed annually for a golf trophy. He would regularly challenge his graduate
students to a game of handball - and win. He also found time to coach baseball
and manage his son's ice hockey league.
After he retired from the University,
Dr. Takemori moved to California and began a new life, finally having enough
time to devote to his many non-academic interests. Even then, he could be available
to provide advice and support when necessary. His loss leaves a large void in
the community of scientific thought. But most of all, we will miss Arky for
his spirit. He was often the life of the party, able to entertain his friends
with many humerous stories. Even though he was a well-known, busy scientist,
he always had time to speak with and encourage his students and junior colleagues.
He served as an excellent role model and mentor. We trusted his counsel. He
will live on in our collective memories, fondly and respectfully.
Sandra Roerig, Ph.D.
Department of Pharmacology
Lousiana State University
Shreveport, LA.
A Tribute to Dr.
Sydney Archer
Dr. Sydney Archer, one of the founders of INRC, an outstanding
scientist and wonderful friend to many of us, passed away on August 22, 1996.
Syd was one of a handful of scientists who met in Basel at the International
Congress of Pharmacology in 1969 and conceived the formation of what has become
the INRC. He served as its second Secretary, immediately following Avram Goldstein.
He continued to be active and just a few weeks ago at our meeting on the Queen
Mary, Syd offered to host the 1999 INRC in Saratoga, NY, --what better way to
illustrate his positive outlook on life! In fact, he had already begun work
on it by appointing a program committee and meeting with people from the Saratoga
Convention Center. At this year’s INRC meeting, a few of Eddy Way's friends
organized a surprise dinner for him at a Chinese restaurant in honor of his
80th birthday. At the dinner Syd Archer served as M.C. He was in great form,
charming and funny.
As a scientist, Sydney was one of the outstanding medicinal
chemists of our time. He attacked 3 of mankind’s major scourges, drug abuse,
cancer and schistosomiasis with equal vigor, creativity and enthusiasm. In the
area of drug abuse he made numerous contributions, many more than I can touch
on here. He synthesized many compounds of both theoretical and practical interest.
His best known compound pentazocine (Talwin) is still in clinical use as an
analgesic. He synthesized numerous affinity ligands and other useful compounds
and participated in many basic research projects. Most recently, in collaboration
with Dr. Jean Bidlack at the University of Rochester, he developed a sensitive
fluorometric assay for opioid receptor binding and was hard at work on a promising
approach to the treatment of cocaine addiction. He played a crucial role in
the creation of the New York State Capital District Center for Drug Abuse Research
and Treatment.
During the many years (1943-1973) Syd spent at Sterling-Winthrop
Research Institute, he rose to the rank of Vice President for Research. He returned
to Academia in 1973, namely, to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI),
where he remained as Professor of Chemistry until his death. He also served
as Dean of the RPI School of Science from 1980 to 1985. How well-liked and highly
regarded Syd was at RPI, was shown by the overflow crowd that filled the RPI
chapel at a recent memorial service for him.
Dr. Archer received many awards, among them the Medicinal
Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society in 1968 and the Inventor
of the Year Award from the Eastern Patent Law Association. He was the holder
of well over 100 patents as well as the author of numerous publications in prestigious
journals.
NIDA utilized Syd’s talents in many ways. He served
on Study Sections, the Editorial Advisory Board, the Board of Advisors of the
Addiction Research Center and on the Director’s External Advisory Committee.
He was active in CPDD and served on its Board of Directors. He also served on
an Advisory Committee on Schistosomiasis of WHO, for which he did a considerable
amount of work and traveling.
On a personal level, I was privileged to interact with Syd
in many ways and we became close friends. We served on many committees together,
planned meetings for INRC (it was he who persuaded me to succeed him as Secretary)
and published a half dozen papers together. I shall always remember his generous
introduction at the occasion of my Nathan B. Eddy Award in Lexington, Kentucky.
Irene and I spent an unforgettable week end at Teddie and
Sydney’s house with many laughs, excellent food, great discussions and
forays to concerts at Tanglewood and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC).
Sydney often came to New York and we always had lunch together on these occasions.
Lunch at Bouley, New York’s number 1 restaurant at the time, was a gourmet
experience. As many of you know, Sydney was well known as a real gourmet among
his myriad of interests.
Dr. Sydney Archer will be mourned and remembered by his family
and by many friends and admirers throughout the world.
Dr. Eric J. Simon
A Tribute to Dr.
Hans Kosterlitz
The following obituary was written by Dr. R. Alan North of
Glaxo Geneva Biomedical Research Institute, a former student and colleague of
Professor Kosterlitz.
Hans Walter Kosterlitz was born in Berlin on 27 April 1903.
He was the son of a physician, and he himself studied medicine in Berlin. Upon
graduation in 1928 he became an assistant in the First Department of Medicine
at the University of Berlin, working both in clinical radiology and in biochemical
research in the area of carbohydrate metabolism and particularly galactosemia.
Kosterlitz arrived in Aberdeen in March 1934; he took a research
assistantship with Professor J J R MacLeod. MacLeod, who shared the 1923 Nobel
prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery of insulin, had returned
to Scotland from Toronto in 1929 to the chair of Physiology. At first Kosterlitz
worked on the relationship between blood pressure and blood sugar concentration;
but MacLeod died in 1935, and Kosterlitz then returned to his earlier interest
in why patients with liver failure had galactosemia. This led to the isolation
of galactose-1-phosphate, the first step in the conversion of galactose to glucose;
the absence of the converting enzyme underlies familial galactosemia. He became
medically qualified in Britain, and received the PhD (1936) and DSc (1944) from
the University of Aberdeen. In 1939 he was appointed Lecturer in the Department
of Physiology and remained on the faculty thereafter (Senior Lecturer, 1945
- 1955; Reader, 1955 - 1968; Professor and Head of Pharmacology Department,
1968 - 1973; Professor Emeritus and Director of the Unit for Research on Addictive
Drugs, 1973 - 1996).
During the war he sought more direct application for his
research and entered the area of nutrition. This led him to try to determine
how diet affected the amount of sympathin (now noradrenaline) released from
hepatic sympathetic nerves. The interest in the autonomic nervous system developed
further during a visit to Otto Krayer’s laboratory at Harvard in 1953,
in which he studied the actions of veratrum alkaloids on the heart. At about
that time, Kosterlitz read a paper by Paul Trendelenburg which had been published
in 1917; this described that low concentrations of opium alkaloids inhibited
the peristaltic reflex on the guinea pig. It was the pursuit and elaboration
of this finding which set the stage for much of his subsequent work.
He showed that morphine inhibited the release of neurotransmitters
from several autonomic neuroeffector junctions, that the effect was greatest
at low frequencies of stimulation, and did not result from local anesthetic
action. He determined the dissociation equilibrium constant for naloxone as
an antagonist of morphine in the guinea pig ileum. In a ‘blind’ experiment
with compounds supplied by Maurice Seevers of Michigan he showed that the action
of various opiates to inhibit acetylcholine release in the guinea pig ileum
correlated very well with their effects in monkey and man. Much of this work
was carried out together with Cairnie, Gyang, Lees, Lydon, Thompson, Wallis,
Watt and Waterfield.
At the age of 65, Hans Kosterlitz became Professor when the
new department of pharmacology was created. One of his appointees as lecturer
was John Hughes, a neuropharmacologist with particular expertise in the release
of noradrenaline. John Hughes joined Hans Kosterlitz when, obliged by age limitations
to ‘retire’ in 1973, he established the Unit for Research on Addictive
Drugs. Several features of the actions of morphine in man and isolated animal
tissues (but particularly the marked selectivity of enantiomers), led them to
reason that it mimicked the actions of substances that occurred naturally in
the body as hormones or neurotransmitters. As it happened, Graeme Henderson
(a PhD student with Hughes and Kosterlitz) had just found a further example
of a morphine-sensitive neuroeffector junction in the mouse vas deferens and
this was used as the principal bioassay for the isolation of the enkephalins.
Such is serendipity -- the guinea pig ileum preparation probably would not have
worked to follow the isolation and purification because it has too much enkephalinase
activity.
The second element of serendipity, and a prepared mind, is
better known. Howard Morris, who had collaborated with Kosterlitz and Hughes
to identify enkephalin definitively by mass spectrometry, heard a lecture by
Derek Smyth on the subject of the pituitary prohormone b-lipotropin. He noticed
that the C fragment of b-lipotropin (now known as b-endorphin) began with the
pentapeptide sequence of Met-enkephalin. Thus was initiated the search for all
the opioid peptide precursor proteins. The discovery of the enkephalins catalyzed
major new fields of research endeavour in neuroscience, physiology, pharmacology
and endocrinology.
The Unit for Research on Addictive Drugs remained at the
forefront of opioid research for the next 10 - 15 years, supported by the Medical
Research Council of Great Britain and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of
the United States. The main contributions during this time were the first distinctions
between m (morphine) and d (vas deferens) receptors, elucidations of the factors
determining the binding of ligands to m, d and k receptors, and studies on the
release of enkephalin from nerves and its degradation in biological tissues.
During these years, Kosterlitz received many awards, prizes, and lectureships.
They included the Schmiedeberg Plakette of the German Pharmacological Society,
the Wellcome Gold Medal of the British Pharmacological Society, the Royal medal
of the Royal Society of London and the Albert Lasker award. He was an honorary
member of the British Pharmacological Society and the Physiological Society,
a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a foreign member of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences.
Hans Kosterlitz died on 26th October 1996 at the age of 93.
All those who met him learned that science was tough but science was fun. Tough
meant rigorous; it meant not discussing things that you did not understand.
Tough meant hard work; Kosterlitz was a man of long hours. Tough meant argumentative,
when an intellectual point was to be made. Fun for Hans was good company, travel,
food and wine. Fun showed itself in his wry humour and the twinkle in the eye.
Fun was embodied in his constant admonition to "work harder but play harder".
He is survived by Hannah, indefatigable wife of almost 60 years, and beloved
of the opioid research community worldwide. Hans and Hannah have one son, Michael,
who is a theoretical physicist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
They have three grandchildren Karin, Jonathan and Elizabeth.
Kosterlitz’s legacy is not only enkephalin; it is the
INRC. At the Fourth International Pharmacology Congress in Basle in 1969, Hans
Kosterlitz and Harry Collier organised a small satellite session of opiates;
thus began the International Narcotics Research Club (now Conference).
The history of the development of the INRC is chronicled
elsewhere, but its future will be a lasting testimony to a man who not only
did science well, but loved science well, and loved the fun of communicating
science.
Dr. R. Alan North
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